the difference is that the leaked report was confirmed by several sources, quite official ones, and has triggered much more than some discussion board threads.. if the swiss parliament has put into place a commission to evaluate the selection process, one can quite easily understand (unless he has an agenda preventing him to admit it) that the report is genuine…

until now, the “dirty play” by gripen adversaries is a statement by a saab official and him alone…

it’s definitely not at the same level as far as credibility goes

don’t know about the tornado stuff, but british Justice has been looking into the Typhoon deal with high suspicions of bribery, just to be asked in perfectly clear terms by PM Tony Blair to stop and think about british jobs…

It was quite a fuss on BBC for some time, people (journalists and auditors alike) asking:

1/ is it normal that the PM tells the justice to shut up

2/ is it normal to pay the customer, while normally, it is the customer who’s supposed to bring th emoney on the table

Nothing has been proven (normal, since the enquiry has been stopped before it ended), but, somehow, it is hard to believe that there was nothing irregular in that deal (if it’s clean, why stop the enquiry, instead of letting it finish and prove everything is ok? )

with a slight difference:

the article on the gripen is based on what real testers of the aircraft acheved (and complain about).

this pile of crap pretend to be a piece of “research” while claiming the perfect opposite of real tests that took part, not to speak about real in war performance of the aircraft.

that reminds me of a link posted in the “indian deal” thread in which a poster (citing an indian retired high officer, unless it was him, not sure about it) warned that eurofighter will, most probably start a sort of “psy war” denigrating the rafale in order to create doubt and put under pressure the political deciders as BAe did to get the Hawk deal ahead of the Alphajet at the time… I don’t know about you, but that “thing”, to remain polite, looks awfully like something along these lines

Right, if they get an evolved Gripen with 40% more fuel than the standard “C” they cant do what they do today… with the F-5E Tiger?!!!
Write some wild assumptions, take several real quotes from officials out of context mix them all et voilá, a piece hit.
But TMOR is right, i am going to stop this in the RFALE topic.

they can’t do the mission they want the new aircraft to perform. if the idea of renewing aircraft was to replace a model by the same level, we’d still have WWI biplanes around…

that is probably why they have set an evaluation, with the minimum requirements (not met by the gripen), and why they wanted the rafale in the first place

I said: no product is worth more than its price…. that doesn’t mean it IS worth the price you pay for it

that means that maybe you pay $7000 for a malibu that is more or less worth it, while the aygo that you pay $14000 in the US is objectively worth $5000 on a global market

what about F-22?:D

it’s part of “any fighter going past M2.0” 😉

Thunder costs 20 million bucks, which translates to over 80 million bucks if it’s made in the USA. not exactly what I would call cheap 😀 although, it could be considered cheap for oil rich Gulf countries

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83FjyYZiLTQ

the price you pay is, at best, what you get worth of…

so, a $20 million aircraft won’t be worth more in any case, sometimes won’t even be worth the 20 million you’ll pay for it…

@ AlphaZulu

the whole thing about the gripen article is that it fits “rafale news” in a sense that it claims that the gripen not satisfying the requirements, dassault as well as eurofighter consortium could be invited to make another proposal for a fixed price…

then, we have a couple of “gripen defenders” feeling the need to defend their bird (basically explaining us that those who test military aircraft for a living have no clue) and there we are now… 😉

expectations are one thing, real life results are another. LM are more or less learning that (or, at least, one should expect so) with the F-35.

Swiss evals, for once that such things have their results at least partially public, show that the field performance of the gripen doesn’t suit their needs, despite what SAAB (or Ueli Maurer, that fabulous aviation expert… ahem :rolleyes: ) claims, and that, even in the evolved form of the aircraft as is today.

And for some that say that “there’s still a lot to do on the aircraft”, the same were claiming that brasil should buy the gripen NG as it was “almost finished” and “the prototype on show right now was already proving that it does the job”

obviously, it doesn’t.